The
publishing company Gakken is celebrating its 70th anniversary in
2017. Since being founded in 1947 Gakken
has made a name for itself in the area of educational books, toys, and
films. In the run-up to their
anniversary, the company has begun sharing their early educational films on YouTube. This is very exciting because their animation
department was at the time the only one in Japan to be led by a woman. Matsue
Jinbo (神保まつえ, b. 1928) took the helm of the animation department
from its formation in 1959 and adapted both foreign and domestic fairy tales
using puppet animation. These films were
not only distributed to schools and libraries in Japan but were also dubbed in
English and distributed to schools and libraries in the United States on
16mm reels. The Gakken 70th anniversary website claims that they will release a total of 40 "art animation" from their archives biweekly on Wednesdays.
The Elves and the Shoemaker (くつやとこびと / Kutsuya to Kobito, 1960) is an adaptation of the popular Grimm fairy
tale (グリム童話) of the same name.
It can be found in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s original 1812 collection
of tales as “Die Wichtelmänner” (Story 39).
The story has been adapted for animation many times including as part of
Warner Bros.’ Merrie Melodies series
as Holiday for Shoestrings (Friz
Freleng, 1946). Freleng used the story
once again for Merrie Melodies in
1956 when he directed Yankee Dood It
featuring Elmer Fudd as king of the elves.
In 1950, Tex Avery turned the tale into The Peachy Cobbler for MGM.
The Gakken
adaptation begins with an elderly shoemaker hard at work in his shop. A man dressed in rags enters the shop and
begs the shoemaker for money. The elderly
shoemaker and his wife have very little themselves, but the shoemaker mends the
man’s shoes and his wife cheerfully offers him what little soup that they
have. The man is grateful and bows as he
leaves.
The elderly couple
remark on the fact that they did not share a single pair of shoes that day as
they sit down to eat their customary meagre dinner of soup. They then get back
to work making shoes. Eventually, the
shoemaker grows too tired to finish and he lays the pieces for the shoes on his
work table so that he can finish his work first thing in the morning.
They wake up
to a beautiful sunny day. The shoemaker
enters his workshop and is shocked to discover that the shoes that he left
unfinished the night before are magically finished. He puts them in the window and a customer
sees them and is so delighted that he pays generously for them.
This gives
the couple enough money to buy materials to make two pairs of shoes. Again, they are unable to finish before bed
and leave the cut material out on the table to finish in the morning. When they awake both pairs are magically
finished. They put them both in the
window and a young girl and boy spot the shoes and buy them right away,
exclaiming that they would pay any amount for such wonderful shoes. And so the magic continues until the elderly
couple have a successful business on their hands. They are curious; however, about how the
shoes are being finished so instead of going to bed they turn off the light and
hide and wait.
As midnight
approaches, singing male voices can be heard and through a crack in the window
five small elves with red caps (tuques for my Canadian readers) enter the
house. They march in single file onto
the work table and perform their work as a team. As they work they sing a cheerful song (their
lips do not move but the lyrics suggest it is the elves singing), reminiscent
of the seven dwarfs whistling while they worked in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
The song tells of each of the elves’ different personalities and how they
work. The shoemaker and his wife are
delighted and grateful for their little helpers. To say thank you, they make the elves some miniature
clothes and leave out a bowl of fruit, a vase of flowers, and a cake. The elves are delighted. They put on their new clothes and dance and
sing “thank you”, “arigatou” and “bye-bye” to the elderly couple.
The
character and set designs are clearly inspired by the native land of the Brothers
Grimm. The building styles are similar to those the German state of Hesse,
where the Grimms lived and gathered their tales. The little elves look very European, and
reminded me of the German animation character Sandmännchen
(1959-present) or the Enid Blyton character Noddy (books: 1949-1963, on British
TV since 1955). The only obvious
Japanese touches are the shoe store sign reading “kutsu” in hiragana and the
cake decorated with the words “Kobito-san Arigatou” (thank you elves), and the
beggar bowing his thanks.
In addition to
the female director Matsue Jinbo, two women animators, Yukiko Arima (有馬征子) and Kyoko Nakamura (中村協子) are given credit. The stop motion is very good and comparable
to other puppet animation for children made at this time. Unser
Sandmännchen (East Germany, 1959-)
and Das Sandmännchen (West Germany,1959-)
again come to mind, as does the UK series The
Adventures of Noddy (1955–63). To
give some historical context, the other big puppet animators in Japan at the
time were Tadahito Mochinaga’s MOM
productions who were also making short films for children such as Little
Black Sambo (1956) and Little
Black Sambo and the Twins (1957). In
the late 1960s Mochinaga’s company would go on to make the more sophisticated Animagic
puppet TV specials for the American production company Rankin/Bass.
Japan’s two most distinguished puppet
film animators, Kihachirō Kawamoto
and Tadanari Okamoto, were just in
the early phases of their career at this point.
Kawamoto was making puppet animation commercials and “Living Storybooks”
for Shiba Productions and Okamoto was making his first puppet film as a student
project at Nihon Daigaku.
The music,
composed by Seiichirō Uno (宇野誠一郎, 1927-2011), is excellent and performed by an
orchestra and male chorus. I particularly
enjoyed the use of xylophone during the cheerful sequences with the elves. Uno also composed the scores for many popular
animation including Vicky the Viking
(小さなバイキング ビッケ, 1974),
The Moomins (ムーミン, 1969-70)
and Puss in Boots (長靴をはいた猫,
1969). The film’s producer is Haruo Itoh
(伊藤治雄).
On the whole
it is a lovely animation that is just as delightful for young children and
their parents today as it must have been in 1960. It was distributed in the United States by Coronet Instructional Films in 1961 under the title The Shoemaker and the Elves. This is a literal translation of the Japanese title. I have used the standard English title of the fairy tale for this review to reflect the fact that the Japanese title is the standard Japanese translation of the original Grimm story.
